Hi there and welcome to year 2012! Today we are going to give you a heads-up on the upcoming Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas 1.3 release.

It is rather unusual for us to publish our major releases so often, however this is something we can not really avoid this time. After 1.2's release we have learned about some problems within our network layer, which can affect the gameplay (eg. problems with map loading, connection timeouts). We wanted to fix them as soon as possible in a point release, but those fixes will unfortunately also break the compatibility with the current MTA:SA 1.2 series. Therefore we can not just make a maintenance bugfix release for 1.2, and have to move straight to 1.3.

This will mean that all existing 1.2 players and server owners will have to update their clients and servers to the new release, and it will be incompatible with older clients (1.2 and below).

Unfortunately, we are not sure right now whether these network fixes work correctly, so we would like you to help us test them before we make the final 1.3 release. You can do that by upgrading your 1.2 clients and servers to the 1.3 release candidate, and report any bugs on our bugtracker. It is fully compatible with your current 1.2 resources though, so all you should need to do is swap the server binaries with the newer ones, or install the new client build.

We intend to keep 1.3 in the RC stage until we are sure that the network issues discovered in 1.2 are fixed.

Aside from network fixes, the next release will also contain the previously mentioned functions for removing default objects from the GTASA map (now also buffed with the possibility of removing breakable objects from the map), a new scripting event - onClientVehicleCollision (see video), as well as all fixes and improvements made to MTA:SA 1.2 since its release (from r3551 upwards).

We understand that transitioning to the next major release is not a simple task for both players and server owners and hosters, however this is something we did not predict to happen. We will do our best to avoid similar situations in the future and go back to our standard release cycle.

Not in this case ChaseOquinn (Atleast I'm hoping and expecting so). The reason for these rushed version numbers are a high amount of network bugs, only fixable in a way that older client and newer server or vice versa are not compatibel anymore. I want to say we should've done such testing with 1.1 already, but we could never expect all these problems before we had them.

Anyway, hows testing on the CIT test server going Arran? I don't hear a lot about failing map downloads (only little freezes), so this issue seems fixed? Would be supernice to even get these freezes fixed, but oh, thats not important.

Also I'll try to finish some scripts today so I can put my server online for some testing too. A while ago Arran noted that MTA stops sending out data when theres no bandwidth available. I don't know if there has been an attempt to fix this, but this will be easy to test if I can get up around 40 players. Also, the map download of my server is relatively big so may also be a nice thing to do some testings with.Let me know if anyone is interested in that.

The 1.3 test was perfect, I never heard of anybody complaining of freezes unless you're referring to the test I did the day before and created 10,000 bins to increase the map size.

Also that "server stops sending out data if no bandwidth available" is probably (but can't find out) fixed by the downgrade unless of course its another factor outside of MTA. I remember before the 1.0.5 optimizations we were using almost all of our CPU and connection and didn't experience the usage drop. But still, a lot has changed since then as we moved servers.

I want to say we should have done such testing with 1.1 already

That was the players and server owners faults for not helping with the testing. If it wasn't for the testing done by me (I found 20 bugs in 1.1 beta) some of them would have got into the release.